It varies. The majority of my dreams are in first person, but sometimes I'll have a more video-game-like dream where I'm controlling a 3rd person character, or one where I'm multiple people, or merely witnessing a scene without having a particular role in it. Identity can be more fluid in dreams.

Have you tried lucid dreaming techniques? You may end up getting more control of your dreams that way and even experience first-person dreaming.

Yep, to actually run fast you really need to move at the 'speed of thought'. Attempting physical style movement often makes you go slow. This applies doubly to flying. Try to fly by flapping your arms and your speed will be slow. Unless you retain your focus on lucidity and the present moment, moving with your mind is difficult and you'll tend to often regress to the slow 'physical' style movement.

This is probably a matter of focus. Your attention may have been scattered, causing the random teleportation, probably due to the excitement of this being your first lucid dream. I like to utilize mantras to help me keep focus during the lucid state. Anything will do, even nonsense words, as long as you get in the habit of saying them.

Reality checks are not totally reliable. The same ones won't always work, and if you do one too much, you'll sometimes find your mind adjusting to them. You can vary them up, and if you go lucid enough you may not need RCs as much.

During lucid dreaming, the imagery can get rather bizarre, particularly the further from your 'ordinary' reality you get. Interpreting lucid dream imagery can be tricky, and maybe not that helpful. But maybe you could say that the crab is your more habitual, unconscious side, staying low to the metaphorical ground and bemoaning the fact that you're moving beyond it via lucid dreaming.

Wow. This game sounds like a complete joke. Rape-hungry dragons, puppy-raping assasins, dog-parks in a medieval fantasy world, KKK wizards. It all seems utterly absurd and nonsensical, including the DM's ridiculous misinterpretation of skill rules. I can't even imagine myself getting angry at a DM that was as bad as him, despite how horrible it is. The game seems so absurd that players would have a hard time getting invested in their characters or the world.

My feeling is that these are representations of the inner world, or the mind, and may represent different states of mind and areas of thought. I'd say it's a good idea to take note of your recurring locales and get to know them. The familiarity may naturally push you towards lucid dreaming. Even if it doesn't, you'll get to know yourself a bit better.

Castle Ravenloft can be tricky to run, just because there are so many different entrances and exits to all the rooms, lots of different floors and multiple ways of getting to each floor. Verbal descriptions are helpful, but only to a point. If the DM gets too detailed with the descriptions, players tend to zone out and forget a lot of what was said. When you're describing a corridor with many exits or a vast chamber like the crypts on the bottom level, you really need to mix up your descriptions with visual aids.

The ideal would be a site like roll20, where you can utilize a fog-of-war for your maps and only unveil what the players see. This is harder if you're running the game in-person, which I did. I ended up using our battle-mat with dry-erase markers and just sketching out the area they were in so they could see the room's layout.

Also, it helps if one of the players takes on the role of the party mapper, even if they're just crude maps that let the party remember where they've been to and what needs to still be explored.

Castle Ravenloft is a big place, but keep in mind that most of it is optional. Via the cards they draw or quests they're given, the party will be steered toward specific parts of it. They don't need to explore the whole thing and probably won't want to.

Violence can be a symbol for change. The dream may be pointing out that something in your relationship to the crush needs to change. This is probably an inner change, a change in your attitude about that person. Having a crush on a person isn't usually all that great. I've been there before, and there's a reason it's called a 'crush'. It crushes you under constant longing, unfulfilled desire and one-sided passion. Getting shot felt good because it was a change, a shift in the energy, a release.

Or maybe the more Freudian types would say that the shooting/stabbing are both stand-ins for sexual penetration. Maybe there's some merit in that, but I won't go too far down that path because I am honestly no expert in that sort of dream interpretation.

It helps to start with some kind of guide, even if you'll eventually find yourself moving beyond it and finding out your own individual dream meanings.

The Dreamer's Dictionary http://bookstore.somsites.org/dreams/ is a book I've found some value in. It takes the approach of looking at everything in the dream as an aspect of yourself and your own inner states.

Remember that all of the books and lists of symbols out there are merely guides. They'll give you possible interpretations for dreams, but not absolute, or universally-agreed-upon Truths. Everyone has their own personal set of dream symbols based on their life, upbringing and beliefs. Look at your dreams enough and you'll find out what yours are.

To me, the prologue does its job in that it gets me interested and makes me want to find out more.

But as others pointed out, it can be a bit confusing at times and the style often makes me wonder what exactly is happening. The opening paragraph, for example, is evocative but puzzling. What is a bloodraven's song? How is the character dealing with such a wound? Is he undead? It's good prose, but seems almost dreamlike.

Also, I don't get a sense of where the characters are fighting, which makes it a bit tough to visualize the scene. It's clear that you want to focus on the action, but a bit of setting could be helpful.